Hi there I was wondering if anybody knows how to do animated water caustics in Daz 4.5? I’m doing an animation with Humpback whales. I think in some 3d animation programs they use something called “Projector Maps.” but I’m not sure. I have noticed that Dream Light has a plug in for this called Animated Textures but that’s for Daz 3.

Hi there I was wondering if anybody knows how to do animated water caustics in Daz 4.5? I’m doing an animation with Humpback whales. I think in some 3d animation programs they use something called “Projector Maps.” but I’m not sure. I have noticed that Dream Light has a plug in for this called Animated Textures but that’s for Daz 3.

Anyway to do this in Daz 4.5?

Thanks for your time:)

Hi…

I don’t think anyone in here can help with that in DS4.5. People in here (with a couple exceptions) aren’t quick to respond to needed help in certain issues.

HOWEVER….My suggestion to YOU would be to either go to these links and purchase Nerd3d’s “WAVES ON THE BEACH” http://www.daz3d.com/shop/waves-on-the-beach which is an animated ocean which has a lot of morphs/controls that will allow you to adjust the animated waves. So that is a quick fix answer to get your animated Ocean/Water.

He also has a Splash tool which you can buy, however, this tool works primarily with Poser. If you have poser then you could go for it and combine that with his waves on the beach. . http://www.daz3d.com/shop/the-splash-tool

OR… do what I’m doing and export your models into another program like Vue, or a gaming engine like Unreal in which you’d export your Whale via FBX.

Unfortunately those products won’t give caustics - the pattern or bright lines reflected from water onto the walls and ceiling of a swimming pool, or projected onto the ocean floor below shallow water. DS can do genuine caustics using Shader Mixer, but the example scene was broken and I’m not sure if it’s been fixed - using that with an animated wave prop such as waves on the beach might work. You can also use Shader Mixer to create an animated shader for a gel that a light would shine through, to fake the effect, given a suitable set of images or a procedural recipe; that would be considerably faster to render. Unfortunately I’m not aware that there are any examples you could use as a guide.

Thanks for the replies, didn’t think I was going to get a reply. Thought my question was to out of the ordinary and going to be one of those sad posts that keep getting bumped down and buried.

Richard that seems like the right idea. I don’t know the Shader Mixer but will open it up and give it a try. I just watched a few videos on YouTube and it looks a little daunting. You said there might be an example scene, but it’s broken. What do you mean by broken? A broken URL link? I can make a caustics map in After Effects. I will try to find some beginner TUTs and maybe I’ll find one that shows me how to project an animated map onto my swimming animated Whales.

There are several example scenes using the Shader Mixer in the Shader Mixer Scenes folder in your main content directory, but I’m not sure that they have been fixed after a change in DS4 made them non-functional in their original form. Edit: just tried, the caustic pattern is being generated in Caustic Sample.dae but the transparency on the glass is not right in my test render. Still, it may help you to see how it should go - though as I indicated above I suspect it will be too slow for an animation.

What might be worth looking into is perhaps the script by mCasual, which allows texture animations. According to the page it was tested with DS 4 at least. It doesn’t seem that easy to work with from the description and I personally never tried it, but perhaps some other people can chime in on that

Refraction caustics is broken in Shader Mixer. I’ll file a bug report if none exists (tomorrow, it’s late here).
If the scene is entirely underwater, you could almost use reflection caustics, which do work, by having lights go up, but I’m not sure it would work visually.
There are gel lights in the store by Syndaryl: http://www.daz3d.com/shop/under-the-sea but I don’t think the gels are animated.
Ketthrove posted an example on how to do gel lights on the old forum (basically the light value multiplies that of an image, used as a mask). Not sure where it is though.